Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860», sayfa 15
THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN
"Que la volonté soit le destin!"
Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,—crouched, but not for slumber or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,—a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,—a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,—a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly; year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest, and warned the simple people of their hour;—yet forever stood the Sphinx, passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and river,—beyond man,—to her hour.—And the hour came.
Once to all things comes their hour. The black column of basalt quivers to its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man out of dust,—once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that marble thrills with magnetic life, drinks its maker's soul, repeats the Paradisaic amen, and owns that it is good. Yea, greater miracle of transcendental truth,—once,—perhaps twice,—the sodden, valueless heart of that old man, whose gold has sucked out all that made him a man, beats with a pulse of generous honor; even in the dust of stocks and the ashes of speculation, amid the howling curses of the poor and the bitter weeping of his own flesh, once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman, brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,—even she has her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish pleasures, the kind look of her dead mother's eye, the clasp of that sister's arm who passed her but yesterday pallid with disgust and ashamed to own their sacred birth-tie: then the tide rolls back: the hour is come! She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and custom with metallic ring and force,—she who forgets the decencies of age in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser in heart even than in aspect,—she, about whom cluster men old and young, applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom,—even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone,—she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame,—even through that world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.
Long had the Sphinx waited. Year after year the flocking pigeons flitted and wheeled through the sweet skies of spring, built their nests and reared their young; tiny lizards, the new birth of the season, coiled and glittered on the hot sands like wandering jewels; every creature, dying out of conscious life, left its perpetuated self behind it, and repeated its own youth in its young, according to its kind: but the Sphinx lived alone. Nor all-unconscious of her solitude: for he who formed that massive shape, chiselled those calm, expectant lips, and wide eyes pensive as setting moons, he had not failed to do what all true artists do in virtue of their truth,—he had shared his own life with his own creation, and it was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or sculptor,—for all are one, and one is all,—that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that wears them.
Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams, the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous noon,—do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought, and you rest in the tropie atmosphere you have created, that in very truth the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you, and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph, but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.
Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is a crown,—do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,—that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of that life, into what you create!
Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and angels.
But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have become mythic, whoever made the Sphinx,—whether it were some Titaness sequestered from all her kind by genie-spells, forced to live amid these desert solitudes, fed from the abundant hands of Nature, and taught by dreams inspired and twilight visions,—
"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair";
her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs, her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some demigod,—"for there were giants in those days,"—who, in the fulness of his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,—as lesser men have carved their memorials on hard Fate,—and then died between its paws, sated with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits, sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting Earth:—whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is true,—that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that yearning of pathetic solitude that most wrings a woman's heart; and the outward semblance, working in, wrought upon the heavy stone with incessant and accumulative power, till through that sluggish sandstone crept a confused thrill of consciousness, and the great creature felt the loneliness that she looked. Far away below her the Nile-valley teemed with life; the antelopes coursed beside their young to feed on the green pasture fresh from its long overflow; red foxes sported with their cubs on the tawny sand; the birds taught their infant offspring their own sweet arts of flight and song on every bough; and even the ostrich, lonely Desert-runner, heaped her treasure of white eggs in the sand, or guided her callow young far from the sight and fear of man;—but the Sphinx sat alone.
Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children!
With a sigh that shook the shores of Egypt and smote the Sicilian midnight with sickening vibrations of earthquake, the Sphinx beheld this culmination of her great desire; in the very hour of fruition, hope fled; and as this grim certainty sped away from before her, taking with it all her borrowed life, she dropped that majestic head lower upon her bosom, uplifted it again for one last look at her offspring, and so stiffened,—once more a stone.
Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away, altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,—her children were gone out into the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic civilization,—its hotbeds of sin and misery,—its civil corruptions and its social lies,—its reeling, rotten principalities,—its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,—needed a new race, stony and strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency, to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry August, fever-smitten and pestilent.
Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!
Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome, banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height, mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder, black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in the Desert,—she knew not her child!
Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the Sphinx's children?
Then a Queen;—a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul, rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless, cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of the Sphinx!
Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall be cut down from his flourishing. On his track fire and blood spread their banners, and the raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister of unconscious good, of half-conscious evil; stern and gloomy to the sacrilegious climax of his well-battled life, even in the regicidal act going as one driven to his deeds by Fate that forgot God;—was he to be wondered at, whose life, in ages far gone, began among the stony Sphinx children?
Nor alone in these great landmarks of their dwelling have the Sphinx's children haunted Earth. Poets have sung them under myriad names; History has chronicled them in groups; Painting and Sculpture have handed down their aspect to a gazing world. From them sprung the Eumenides, pursuers and destroyers of men. They wore the garb of Roman legionaries, when Ramah wept for her children dashed against the walls of the Holy City, and not one stone stood upon another in Zion. They crowded the offices of the Inquisition, and tested the endurance of its victims, with steady finger on the flickering pulse, and calm eye on the death-sweating brow and bitten lip. They put on the Druid's robe and wreath, and held the human sacrifice closer to its altar. In the Asiatic jungle, lurking behind the palm-trunk, they waited, lithe and swarthy Thugs, treacherously to slay whatever victim passed by alone; or in the fair Pacific islands kept horrid jubilee above their feasts of human flesh, and streaked themselves with kindred blood in their carousals. Holland tells its fearful story of their Spanish rule. Russian serfs record their despotism, cowering at the memory of the knout. France cringes yet at the names of the black few who guided her roaring Revolution as one might guide the ravages of a tiger with curb of adamant and rein of linked steel.
Africa stretches out her hands to testify of their presence. Too well those golden shores recall the wail of women and the yelling curses of men, driven, beast-fashion, to their pen, and floated from home to hell, or,—happier fate!—dragged up, in terror of pursuit, and thrown overboard, a brief agony for a long one. They know them, too, whose continual cry of separation, starvation, insult, agony, and death rises from the heart of freedom like the steam of a great pestilence,—Pity them, hearts of flesh! pity also the captors,—the Sphinx children, the flint-hearts! pity those who cannot feel, far beyond those who can,—though it be but to suffer!
New England knew them, in band and steeple-hat, hanging and pressing to death helpless women, bewitched with witchcraft. Acadia knew them, when its depopulated shores lay barren before the sun, and its homes sent up no smoke to heaven.
Greece quivers at the phantasm of their Turkish turbans and gleaming sabres, their skill at massacre and their fiendish tortures; Italy, fair and sad, "woman-country," droops shuddering at sight of their Austrian uniforms; and the Brahmin sees them in scarlet, blood-dyed, hurling from the cannon's mouth helpless captives,—killing, not converting.
Wherever, all the wide world over, a nation shrinks from its oppressors, or a slave from his master,—wherever a child flees from the face of a parent who knows neither justice nor mercy, or a wife goes mad under the secret tyranny of her inevitable fate,—wherever pity and mercy and love veil their faces and wring their hands outside the threshold,—there abide the Sphinx's children.
For this she longed and hoped and waited in the Desert! for this she envied the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude! for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful aspiration!
Happy Sphinx, to be left even of that dull existence! blessedly unconscious of that granted desire! mouldering away in the curling sand-hills, the prey of hostile elements, the mysterious symbol of a secret yearning and a vain desire! Not for thee the bitterness of success! not for thee the conscious agony of penitence,—the falling temple of the will crushing its idolater! No wild voices in the wind reproach the wilder pulses of a slow-breaking heart; no keen words of taunt sting thee into madness; Memory hurls at thee no flying javelins; broken-winged Hope flutters about thee no more! Thy day is over, thine hour is past!
"Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive!"
